Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies
Part XXXI: Toni Morrison/Vladimir Nabokov
by Travis Hedge Coke
Every time you are audience or artist, performer or presenter or present, you fictionalize yourself and you map yourself and you are mapped and you are told.
I set out personal reasons for which worlds we explore in Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies. These reasons limited the number of franchises which were created by women, the number of worlds which were largely steered or directed by women, curtailed any wealth or breadth of queer and nonwhite voice, even when principle characters, creatives, producers or authors are queer or nonwhite.
A fashion magazine adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.
In the spirit of choosing franchise universes I had to be at least passingly familiar with, which had a sustained commercial presence over decades, with little thematic or motif overlap, and which would not have a socially-upsetting weariness or content-warning wariness to discussions, I felt I had to veer away from Octavia Butler, A Different World, Jirel of Joiry stories, Leigh Brackett’s Eric John Stark, Mary Lambert’s filmic body of work, Bunheads or Gilmore Girls or Nancy Drew. Even there, I would have been exceptionally centered on the United States.
I set thirty-two main chapters, thirty-two main worlds to cover, because Beethoven wrote thirty-two sonatas and Franz Schubert died at thirty-one, and all manner of arbitrary relations wobbling between thirty-one and thirty-three that let me comfortably choose. It did not matter. If these were not going to become exhausting for you and me, it could go on eternally.
You and I both want my Princess Diaries chapter; my look at poetic observation and Yoko Ono songs. They are not here.
The lamp-shading of white dominance and orientalism in Gregory Hatanaka’s Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance has to happen, but Hatanaka, in order to make that movie, has to address the kind of movie he saw in his youth and the effects that white domination have, which white colonialism have on how we see and what we let ourselves talk about first. Hatanaka, during the Covid pandemic, made over a dozen movies, including Quarantine Girl, The Awakening of Emanuelle, and Amityville Cop, which is on the surface operating on nostalgia for the Amityville possession stories and successive movies but in practice is an emotional consideration of American police violence and media obfuscation.
A series about race, class, ageism, politics, sexuality, and whether Wolverine is sexier than young Darth Vader.
All entertainment is more intelligent than you are thinking and has bigger or more flaws than you are remembering.
All.
All this is, is entertainment. Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies is academic enough, and I have a drive to help, to be helpful, to be useful with what is placed in each chapter, how the chapters move forward and correlate. In many ways, the cosmologies are in the works, themselves, and the cosmogonies are here.
What does it truly mean, the criteria I set up? Why am I afraid to treat Princess Diaries or A Different World to the same less than exacting standards? Why am I picking your comfort for you?
Doc McStuffins is (not) judging me. Or, you.
There are venues where my points of reference are Toni Morrison. There are venues where my reference points are Vladimir Nabokov. Where they are Batman. When they are Doc McStuffins. In a lecture hall or on a podcast I have good excuses for why, when, where, which. Choosing here, I could blame the venue. It would be blame.
If I say several complimentary things about Nabokov, then two criticisms, you might believe I hate his work, or that I am jealous of his success. If I praise Toni Morrison a little, but largely disregard her success or talent in favor of criticisms… that’s de rigueur. The anglophone education system, especially in North America, is set up with special calendar slots for a Black writer, an Asian actor. A value on white cishet men placed implicitly and explicitly.
How much am I afraid and when am I affecting a persona for effects?
The education system and academic criticism are flush with talk of “mongrel literatures,” and “minor literatures.” There is black comedy and there is Black comedy and there is, well, an entire mess of terminology. These biases are not one day arrived at though miracle. The basic elements of societies guide their members. It was society which has made it difficult to declaim JK Rowling’s racism or classism, her transphobia, the flaws in her literature and her political arguments and anecdotal stories, but even she would get away with more if she was a cishet man. We can have footage of a white guy poets kicking their girlfriend or police records of them shooting their wife in the head. It is impolite to say, and to stop with, Ezra Pound being a fascist.
Toni Morrison.
I have had students argue with me when I said Toni Morrison has a Nobel Prize and Vladimir Nabokov never received one. Like me, you have probably read at least one article which ascribed Morrison’s popularity and reach to “the Oprah Effect,” a specious theory, especially in the face of Morrison already having a Pulitzer, a Nobel, an American Book Award and a place in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres before her famous appearance on and promotion by Oprah Winfrey’s media empire. Her oft-contested novel, The Bluest Eye, had been taught in schools routinely for decades. Even if readers stopped there, with the one novel, they had read a Toni Morrison novel. Beloved’s theories of rememory were transformative for a reading public and professional academicians and critics in and outside the literary field.
If I took on Nabokov’s ouvre, the awards become expected (even the many he did not receive), and if I said that his career had a boost because of a Peter Sellers Effect, few would take me seriously.
But, if I talk at length about Morrison or Nabokov, who am I hoping to speak to, and are you here?
I don’t know. Right? I do not know.
Vladimir Nabokov.
It is difficult to distance oneself enough to reconcile franchise or body of work worlds into a chapter of a book, into an essay with flavor. It is complicated, trying to suss out who your real audience is. If you are me, it might even be worse. I never know when I am being humored, I always feel I have overstayed any welcome and I know for fact that many of my friends’ romantic partners would rather I not stick around as long as I do. What is writing a book or a series of articles, a poem, a song, a reminder note, if not balancing your sense of welcome with your wish for entreaty?
I did not reach for some of the easiest opportunities. All My Children and similar soap operas have devoted, serious, eager audiences, even long after their cancelations or any kind of delays. I could have done the Marvel or DC Universes, or their cinematic cousins, and been assured of at least some visitations by curious strangers. I consciously avoided Star Wars. I consciously avoided the Riddick universe. I was talked into the Smurfs, Twin Peaks, and The Invisibles. I am afraid to talk Star Wars, I am going to embarrass somebody talking about Pitch Black, Riddick and those movies. The Invisibles is not really as famous or infamous as Grant Morrison or Phil Jimenez fans can sometimes believe. If I wanted to write about a successful Jill Thompson world, I could have done a chapter on Scary Godmother.
How important are familiarity and concern before you explore a fictional world for an audience? Before you explore on behalf of others?
Explore seems pretentious. As pretentious as pretending that Toni Morrison failed if she reached an academic audience first with a piece but that Nabokov is a genius if he did the same.
It is pretentious to say it is push and pull, but reaching is always a but, and and, and but it is also push and pull.
Beloved, a novel by Toni Morrison.
I cannot say a thing about Native entertainment while parties are creating anti-Black, anti-mixed racial strife and playing volunteer Nazi for cheap press. That is not brave or smart of me. It is cowardly.
What would I cover? We are genocided out of our chance. A season of a tv show with Natives in prominent roles is an achievement.
Imagine the essay in this collection, the chapter of this free-to-read online book, in which I look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The regressive racial politics, the sexism, the attempt to even out the dutch angles in Thor. I like a number of MCU and other Marvel-related movies! It would not appear so if I was to dive into the politics, the conflation of communism and Nazis as a way to excuse United States corruption and systemic policy that is racist and violent.
In a post-MCU mindscape, if a body of work is not a causal multiverse, it is a reflexive, ethical one.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, a novel by Vladimir Nabokov.
Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies had to be dizzying. I have do to everything I am afraid or embarrassed to do.
I once played Star Wars Trivial Pursuit with a small group, some friends, some strangers. I had a tendency to pass because while I had seen the original three movies, and the two prequels which had by that time been released, I was not embedded in the universe in a real way. Some questions baffled me before I could even come to understanding what the answers could be.
A man on another team became incensed when I passed during one round. Furious. He slapped bottles and snacks from the tabletop. The game spilled to the floor. His wife had to hold him while he cried and bellowed and told me I could never watch Star Wars again if I cannot show them respect.
I ate Red Vines on the ride home afterwards.
I did not watch a Star Wars movie for sixteen years.
I really like the Ewok movies. I am happy to sit and watch the cartoons when they are on. There’s no bras in space is still very very suspect.
They don’t make movies of Morrison novels for me to be hesitant.
Toni Morrison’s body of fiction and her nonfiction share a creative and reflective space of experience and experiential truths. Her records of engagements, emotions, politics, interactions, time lines and time zones are via negativa in the light of colonial-minded, imperialist-faith catalogue-thrilled fiction and essays, which is the purview and playpen of Nabokov and similar austere authors.
Morrison may outlast Nabokov in fiction because she is not trying to be anyone’s king and a king is not a god and a god in not in a book and rabbit holes all the way down, I’m afraid. Trompe l’oeil investigation.
Or, it is instigation?
One way to show A Different World.
I am not going to do everything I am afraid of. Or, half.
We can become so colonized – and I mean we because colonizers are the first colonized; we are all in and onboard this boat – we become so caught that like Alice in some tellings of Alice in Wonderland, we focus so on getting small enough to fit through a door we forget to take the key off the table before we are too short to do it. We say things like, “emotional reality.” I say, “emotional reality.” I mean, reality.
Morrison’s Beloved and The Bluest Eye depend on emotional reality, on feeling whether we can acknowledge or not. Acknowledgment is something you can be afforded or not, but we all have less choice in feeling. If emotion is less reducible than social politic, if feeling is harder to dissect or dilute than memory and telling, then memory and telling ought, to be honest, to be earnest, serve feeling.
We let ourselves be boxed by words. Be caged by words and punched by words rabbit punched by drunk punched by systemically and sessilely, sistroid sistra, sashaying sassily sastrugi-like, liturgical, litigious, libidinal, liberal. We do not allow ourselves to be boxed in. We are boxed in. We are in circumstance.
Another way to show A Different World.
Whoever you are, you can find a knife in some ally’s hand. You can find likeness, likemindedness, and in the same, something antagonistic or worse. To be queer is not to be incapable of hating another person for their queerness, or all for their queerness. To be one ethnicity or in a box of ethnicities, a gender or agender or a gendered, we are all subject to hates and fears and blocks and boxes. We can find ourselves standing tall to be degraded, to degrade and upbraid when we believe we are illuminating, correcting, teaching, parenting, sibling, nibling, nibbling on bones for strength like they tell us to take bone brother for osteo and plant old cadaver bones in bodies in correction in scale, in scale you can always find a knife in some ally’s hand.
Words, carrying semantic prosody, rely on feeling and principle, for purpose, the emotionality called analysis, academics, intellectualism, fairness.
Is irony a feeling? It is a sense. A sensibility. The difference?
A fashion magazine adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.
Arguments for whether the titular Beloved is a ghost or not a ghost rely not on definitions of ghost, but that ghost is, by definition, contradictory. Ghost is less and more than liminal. Ghost is limned. Ghost is, as a word, and the word is the thing, how we feel. What we feel about it.
Everything is a ghost until it is not.
Everything is a ghost until it is not.